After Paradise
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: [post-epilogue] Paradise is a reward, for a time. But not forever. SPOILERS FOR BOOK 7!


**A/N:** Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c56 - write about a canon pairing, and for the Advent Calender 2015, day 2 - write about time getting away from someone.

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 **After Paradise**

Eden was a paradise: just the two of them, Sentinel, and the beasts. But it was lonely. Even after Sentinel reached out to the other comptermachines. Even after he talked with Ines, and God from the Pellmar Quadrants. Even after talking through God with Tash and Miryum and Ahmedri, rejoicing in the news that Miryum lived and Sentinel could now free Tash and cure Miryum of the plague that gripped her. Even after talking with Dell through Ines, and later friends who'd been sent out as emissiries to link the rest of the world as well.

Eden was isolated, and aside from Rushton there was no humans save the voices through Sentinel and the images she projected.

Eden was supposed to be her reward, and for a time it had been exactly that: a peaceful intermission where she could tend to her wounded, fragile heart, and bask in Rushton's company - Rushton who she'd missed for so long, Rushtorn who shared her mind and soul. In truth, Rushton sound have been all the company in the world but at some point her soul began starving for more. Began starving for Dragon's bright eyes and flaming hair, with Matthew by her side. Began striving for Ana's brave, tightly-held face - poor Ana who lived on when Swallow died. And dear Dameon, who Elspeth could only hope had found a woman he could love and who was worthy of her love. Gilaine and Daffyd and Jakoby and so many other friends she'd made throughout her life, throughout her journey...

Ever so slowly, she began to miss them. And the ache grew worse every day, and she could not tell at all whether it was the block in her heart fading away, no longer in need, or if it was her restless spirit, unable to find eternal peace.

"User Elspeth?" asked Sentinel. She had evolved, truly, to show worry and concern like a mother hen of sorts, but she could only be one friend, not the hundreds scattered throughout the land.

"Elf?" And that was Rushton, who'd at some point adopted her brother's pet name for her. She smiled at him - smiled at them both - but something slipped into her expression, like it seemed to always do of late.

"I am fine,' she said. She always said it, and Rushton perhaps understood the words unsaid between them. Sentinel seemed not to, and it had taken a bit of word-juggling before God in the Pellmar Quadrants had grasped the idea of loneliness, if indeed she ever had. Elspeth could not say for sure. Perhaps Tash could, or Ana - or perhaps Ana's machine-empathy would tell a different tale. Ana who had been offered by Sentinel to come. Ana who'd chosen to remain in the Land, to mourn her love, to mourn all that had been lost and left behind.

Ana was a brave women. Perhaps, Elspeth reflected, she had made the wrong decision in entering a paradise from which there was no escape, because the yearning for company only grew, and Ines and God and the new computermachines springing up could only decant the surface of that yearning, and Rushton too. And the thought that they may one day tire of each other began to form.

Rushton caught a glimpse of that thought, in one of their many unions - for there was little else to do in paradise save bond, and beast-speak, and communicate with or through Sentinel. "We will never tire of each other," he said fiercely, but in his face was a wariness Elspeth was sure was mirrored in her own.

Obernewtyn would stand on its own, they had said. The land would stand on its own, without them, they had said. The Seeker's role was complete - and yet, paradise, their rewarding abode, was not a place they could easily rest.

And yet Elspeth had been forseen to never return to Obernewtyn, and that thought made her feel like a prisoner in Eden's cell.

"Do you wish you could visit the world?" she asked, sometimes.

"Sometimes," Rushton replied. "Everything we could ever want is here, except true physical contact with others, and adventure."

"Adventure." Elspeth laughed. They really should have had enough of adventures. Rushton still bore his scars. No scars would ever grip Elspeth and that had been proven many times. And there was no-one to coerce here, nothing to futuretell, and farseeking was more a luxury than anything more. It made her feel inadequate at times and overflowing with powers for which she no longer had a need. As though she had been birthed for the purpose of switching off the BOT, defeating the Destroyer and freeing the sleeping beasts from their cryopods in Eden and that was all, and poor Rushton had been swept into it all. There would be no more Seraphims to rule Obernewtyn. Cassandra's and Hannah's lines - those lives from the Beforetime that had wound themselves so implicitly into my destiny - had both come to an end. Swallow lay dead in the Redlands. Rushton remained with me - though there was still Iriny. Iriny would lead the gypsies and they had left a legacy behind in Obernewtyn as well, a legacy that went deeper than blood.

The weariness dragged on. They met more of their old friends again through the computermachine. Beasts began to die in Eden and it became less like a paradise and more like reality, and that, to her horror, soothed some of the restlessness in their souls. How callous they'd become! But death was a cycle of life as well and she'd seen such terrible ones that deaths from old age were a blessing she'd spent too long waiting for.

And it wasn't just death. The animals had been paired in the cryopods and so they awoke in pairs, and they propogated. They were nice breaks to the monotone, when the monotone began. It had been amusing watching Sentinel fumble through caring for wolf cubs, and it had become something with which to pass the time.

And, sometimes, the pair of them would look wistfully at the cubs and wonder if they would have a child to run about with them. And then, Elspeth at least, would question the wisdom of that - the wisdom of birthing a child who would live out their life in a prison of a paradise, who would have no human contact at all except through Sentinel and how would they mean anything to the child who had never met those people in person before? And then the child would die, without a partner, without a child of his or her own, and it seemed like a miserable existence to give to anyone and so they never tried.

Because Eden was supposed to be a paradise, but it was a prison as well, and it would be moreso for a child who would see the rest of the world but never touch it. Unless Eden would one day reconnect with the world - but until she saw that, or a futureteller like Maryon passed on the message, she would not risk a child. And there was Rushton, and the beasts and their children and grandchildren, and Sentinel - and the echoes of their friends through the computermachine.


End file.
